Join us at the table for this 34-course banquet of original stories from food-obsessed writers and chefs sharing their life-changing food experiences.

The dubious joy of a Twinkie, the hunger-sauced rhapsody of fish heads, the grand celebration of an Indian wedding feast; the things we eat and the people we eat with remain powerful signposts in our memories, long after the plates have been cleared. Tuck in, and bon appetit!

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seafood you are ever likely to eat in Britain. They provide the shellfish, the cutlery and the crockery. We will have to bring the rest. We meet at Liverpool Street Station, in the City of London. Solemnly David shows me the bottle of Muscadet Sèvre et Maine he has bought for the occasion, which he says is the only white wine to drink with oysters. He has a couple of bottles of ink-dark Porter ale plus a bottle of soy sauce and a tube of wasabi paste. David’s wife is Japanese-American and he has

permission …’), and gave us to believe that we were lucky to be eating at all, there was no question of travelling the extra miles across town, or spending the extra pence, that might occasionally have scored us the bona fide twentieth-century American originals we craved. And some products you could not get here at all: applejacks, Hershey bars, Oreo biscuits, but most of all Hostess Twinkies. Ah, Hostess Twinkies. The tastiest thing I never ate. These I knew about from comics, specifically

week during peak summer months. The realtor’s catalogue, like all catalogues, did not misrepresent nor distort; it simply fanned your fantasies and airbrushed the rest. The big picture spelled Chianti of your dreams; the devil was in the details. We had arrived after a week in Rome as we’d done every year. Sweaty, exhausted, lugging lots of dirty laundry, we expected to do what we’d done every other year: throw everything in the washing machine then hop into the pool. Instead the matronly owner

restaurants, Koshary El Tahrir being easily the most satisfying. However, all it takes is one day in the city, September 9, 2011, for me to be stripped of my hope for the Arab Spring. Everything my friends in Beirut had warned me about came true. That night, long after I had left Tahrir Square, protestors marched on the Israeli Embassy, an act of infamy. Three Egyptians were killed by security forces, and the scaredy-cat Israeli ambassador fled the country. (Moshe Dayan, Israeli war hero, would

the crust was so flat, pale and flavorless I was reminded of the unleavened bread that the Jews took out of Egypt when they fled a few thousand years ago. The best feature of Abou El Sid, it turned out, was that magnificent door. If only it had remained locked. Inside, this classic restaurant resembled a haunted house, the mood enhanced by an occasional screeching sound, which was either a banshee or a blender gone berserk. I tried all manner of dishes, including a green soup containing